


and we'll sail straight on 'til the morning

by madamemasque



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brownies, Mentions of Mary Winchester - Freeform, Preseries, Winter, bros taking care of each other, mentions of John Winchester - Freeform, very platonic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 12:56:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3897151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamemasque/pseuds/madamemasque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let it be said that Sam Winchester is a boy of many talents, but baking is not one of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and we'll sail straight on 'til the morning

**Author's Note:**

> This was for chappedassmonkey fanfiction challenge under the prompt "the biggest idiot in the world".

At the first sneeze, Sam stirs a bit, eyes fluttering to let in the weak and watery winter sunlight, mouth opening for a yawn that’s much too cavernous for such a small body.

The second sneeze stops Sam mid yawn. He makes a funny picture, perfect blackmail material: mouth still gaping open, but eyes narrowed suspiciously.

The third sneeze really does it. The sensations formerly dulled by sleep come rushing in and Sam finally realizes how warm the bed is,  _too warm_ , and how the sweat from Dean’s pillow has chilled his own. He leaps from the bed and returns with a thermometer moments before the fourth sneeze starts miniscule tremors through Dean’s body.

“Sammy, come  _on_. I barely sneezed, like, twice.” Dean’s voice is croaky and Sam might have laughed at him for sounding like a severely drunk Santa,  _if_ he wasn’t so worried.

“Likely story, Dean. One-oh-one fever. You’re officially on bed rest.”

Dean tries to resist, citing facts about how fevers are actually just the body’s way of fighting off infection,  _so technically I’m just fine and my body’s gonna take care of me so you don’t have to_ , and a whole plethora of horse crap that would’ve worked on Dad or someone else without a spine; but Dean and his excuses have been in Sam’s life since it started. Sam could practically write an owner’s manual for keeping up with his brother.  _The Complete Illustrated Guide to Nurturing Dean Winchester by Sam Winchester_ absolutely does not include letting Dean get out of bed with a high fever.

So Sam does what he does best. He treats his brother to some good old-fashioned TLC.

First, he wrestles Dean back into the blankets and coerces him into putting on sweats and a flannel shirt over the typical boxer shorts he always wears to bed. “We’re in Minnesota in the middle of January, why the hell don’t wear warmer stuff, stupid?” Sam asks as Dean shuffles into the clothes. Dean doesn’t deign to answer the question with anything but a snort. Or it may just be another sneeze masked by the several tons of snot he has up his nose. Sam can’t really tell.

Next, he makes Dean lie on the ratty couch in the makeshift living room of their dingy apartment while he changes the sweaty sheets and pillowcases on their beds. Dean moans and groans about how he should be able to watch the news at least, goddammit, but Sam isn’t having any of that. A sick Dean is bad enough, but a moody Dean with a headache is a calamity in and of itself.

Sam hums to himself while he moves around the bedroom, making quick work of the bed, putting the sheets in the laundry with their dirty clothes from the week. He places a wastebasket next to Dean’s side of the bed and a box of tissues on top of the cardboard box that serves as their bedside table. As he looks around the room, he has a small chance to appreciate how almost normal it looks. Like a real family could live here, like two brothers with school and work and girl problems could share a bed here, like there might have been figurative monsters under the bed here, driven away by age and growing indifference.

It’s wishful thinking, though. Sam has known since he was four that the monsters under his bed were very real and that no amount of age and indifference would ever make them go away.

With a sigh, he pulls himself up from the bed and pads down to living room, flopping unceremoniously down on the couch on top of Dean’s outstretched legs, hard enough to claim the space but not hard enough to hurt him. Dean mutters some curses under his breath, but pulls his feet up a tiny bit, relinquishing some of the blanket too.

“Pretty innit?” Dean jerks a thumb towards their windows, gesturing to the swirling mass of snowflakes outside. The one way glass windows are probably the only beautiful thing about the rental apartment, at least in Sam’s mind. John would scoff and cite how the apartment is keeping them out of the Minnesota winter and how that’s pretty goddamn beautiful thing too, but Sam loves these windows. The apartment is on the ground floor, so they’re taller than him, reaching almost to the ceiling and offering an unprecedented view of the world beyond. When they were searching for an apartment a month ago for a case that had gone sour, Sam had fallen in love with this one solely because of the windows. The rent was twice as expensive as the other mainstream apartments in the building and they didn’t really serve some completely utilitarian purpose, but John is less immune to Sam’s puppy dog eyes than he’d care to admit.

Sam dreams of owning a house where all the windows are like this one day.

They sit in silence for a while, staring at the world outside that’s steadily getting devoured by the flurries. It’s beautiful in a way that hardly anything has ever been beautiful in their lives, pure and innocent and lovely.

Finally Dean breaks the silence, his words of the slurred and dreamlike quality of someone who is moments away from falling into sleep. “I remember those brownies Mom used to make during the winter. We’d have them with milk. All warm and gooey…and nice. They were nice brownies, Sammy.”

Sam is stunned for a moment, the bitter tendrils of sadness creeping into his veins. He doesn’t remember those brownies, he hardly remembers anything about Mom. His memories about her are like pretty much everything he owns, hand-me-downs, secondhand memories from the rare times John or Dean mention her.

But Dean does remember her, enough to the point where he can pinpoint the exact taste of the brownies she made, and Dean deserves the absolute world, if not a taste of those brownies again. So Sam sits up from the couch, an idea already forming in his mind as he makes his way across the room to the kitchen.

Four and a half hours later, Dean is still blissfully snoring and there is a murder scene in the kitchen. A putrid smelling batter of flour, eggs, brown sugar and chocolate powder covers almost every inch of every countertop, cabinet and drawer. The only thing that looks worse than the room is Sam himself, who has managed to not only cover himself in the brownie mix, but also given himself a bruise from a pan falling on his head, a scratch from prying open the bag of brown sugar with a knife, a fork and an ice cream scoop, and the sickly sense that if he got salmonella from just sniffing the eggs to see if they were still edible, it would be too goddamn soon.

Let it be said that Sam Winchester is a boy of many talents, but baking is not one of them.

Thankfully, though, his work hasn’t gone completely to waste because there is a pan of brownie mix in the oven. He prays to any deity that is listening  _to please, please just make them taste good, for Dean, just for Dean._

Sam is so entrenched in his own thoughts that he doesn’t even notice when Dean trudges into the kitchen.

“Sammy, what the hell did you  _do_?”

Sam whips around, a thousand excuses already on his lips,  _there was a monster, a serial killer broke in_ , but he sees Dean’s tired green eyes and how he braces himself against the countertop to keep standing and all Sam can say is, “I wanted to make you Mom’s brownies again.”

Dean tilts his head, obviously confused. “What are you talking about?”

“You were talking about Mom’s brownies and you never talk about her and you must really have wanted them if you were, like,  _subconsciously_  thinking of them and you’re sick and you never want anything and you pretty much do everything for me and I just really wanted you to have them but then it’s just that I’m really bad at baking and…well, I just-“ Sam stops to breath and he’s about to launch into another spiel but then Dean does something completely unexpected.

He laughs. And it’s not some wimpy ass giggle either. It’s full blown tears-streaming-down-the-face, gasping-for-breath, wheezy, snotty laughing. Sam almost feels insulted, but Dean never laughs like this anymore and Sam’s kind of proud that he’s the one who made him laugh again.

“Oh, man, Sammy. Look at you. Look at this mess, it’s hilarious. You’re like…I don’t even know man. You’re just…” And Dean breaks down laughing again, pounding his chest to keep from coughing or sneezing or both. Sam joins in too, hesitant at first because he’s still embarrassed, but he eventually forgets it all and just laughs along with his brother. It’s stupid and ridiculous but they can’t stop, and if they could it’s not like they’d even want to, because laughs like these are hard to come by in their line of work and they’d enjoy every single one that came by.

Finally, the oven’s timer goes off and Sam hurries to get the brownies out. Dean, still chuckling under his breath, grabs the milk carton out of the fridge and a glass for each of them.

Dean tucks into the brownies and exclaims, “Damn, Sammy, you’ve been holding out on me,” and it means the world to Sam, to see his big brother happy and warm, with that stupidly wonderful grin on his face. Forget vampires and werewolves, demons and wraiths, Sam would end entire nations to see Dean like this every day.

So later, when they’re cleaning up the mess in the kitchen and Dean reaches over to wrap an arm around Sam’s neck, saying “You’re the biggest idiot in the world, you know that?” with an undoubted undercurrent of love, Sam doesn’t miss a beat with his reply: “Yeah, but I’m your idiot.”

Dean doesn’t need words for Sam to understand what he’s really saying.

_Thank you, little brother._

_Thank you for saving me._  

**Author's Note:**

> As always, please leave comments on how you liked the story, it makes me feel all warm and happy inside.


End file.
